All that said, (Jake browning sucks BUT) I think this year's losses are pretty squarely on the failings of the coaches and not some other outside variables or outliers. Namely, recruiting, game plans, and in game decisions. The fact that our losses were so close are, to me, part of what's so damning. This team is just not that good. Hopefully, with some luck, it can be good enough to win a shitty Pac12 and with some extreme luck win a shitty Rosebowl. At this point though, I am of the opinion that that is more bargaining stage of grief and denial with hope than a likely outcome.
Also want to say yes, this completely. This is exactly why this is a frustrating season.
I think it depends what you mean but this team is just not that good. They are a good team in my eyes. They are not a great team and they are definitely not an elite team. I have a hard time calling this a bad or average team however despite our talent short comings at key (all?) positions.
Well, for a more reasoned response after actually reading the wall of text @Mad_Son, I'll be the first one to preach that there's a lot of variance and uncontrolled variables in football which lead to lots of wacky outcomes when it comes to head-to-head. You are essentially pitting four averages with high variance against one another, PPG & PPGA for both teams. Unsurprisingly, these numbers can have a range of outcomes that can look vastly different. A game is a weighted coin toss and that's why it's better to think of outcomes in terms of percentages or X out of 10 than as a pure binary W or L.
As much as head to head wins have a really high variance your overall record should, more or less, be a solid indicator of who you are as a team across a season. As you said, body of work.
law of av·er·ag·es noun the principle that supposes most future events are likely to balance any past deviation from a presumed average.
All that said, (Jake browning sucks BUT) I think this year's losses are pretty squarely on the failings of the coaches and not some other outside variables or outliers. Namely, recruiting, game plans, and in game decisions. The fact that our losses were so close are, to me, part of what's so damning. This team is just not that good. Hopefully, with some luck, it can be good enough to win a shitty Pac12 and with some extreme luck win a shitty Rosebowl. At this point though, I am of the opinion that that is more bargaining stage of grief and denial with hope than a likely outcome.
I think the key here is that while there will be some distribution of outcomes based on uncontrolled variables, the points scored and points allowed are not independent variables in a head to head match up. How much one team scores is partially based on how good that team is at offense as well as how good the other team is at defense (as well as myriad other non-primary ordinal effects which introduce extra variance). A game decided by one score could be a good team having a bad day on its distribution of possible outcomes vs a bad team's good day in its distribution, it could be two comparably matched teams having comparable places on their results distributions, etc. To have a bad team blow out a good team and win by 4 scores would likely be multiple standard deviations out of the expected range of outcomes and the data supports the notion that a blowout indicates the better team won.
Since we don't play a series like in baseball where we get to do multiple weighted coin flips, we can use extra information that we have (score) to infer more about the relative statures of the teams. I would trust the overall record to the law of averages for n >> 12. Given that one 80/20 outcome coming up 20 can represents 8% of a total body of work I think it is worth understanding what score differentials tell us beyond binary win-loss.
Comments
I think it depends what you mean but this team is just not that good. They are a good team in my eyes. They are not a great team and they are definitely not an elite team. I have a hard time calling this a bad or average team however despite our talent short comings at key (all?) positions.